This brief post deals with something that came to my attention while walking the floor at Ad:Tech. It looks like Google's latest Quality Score update, announced in this post on November 6 has started to take effect. Reports are varied with respect to what type of advertisers have been impacted. This change appears to mirror the aims set forth by the prior updatein July for those buying on content.

I have written some posts in the past that I can say I'm truly proud. This one might not be among them, but it might just be one of the most useful :)

In a few short days, the largest online advertising event will commence. While we all book our tickets, schedule meetings, and break out the comfortable shows to get business done, what everybody looks forward to are the parties. Here is the 2nd annual DM ConfidentialGuide to Ad:Tech Nightlife.

The parties are listed in order of start time. Make sure to RSVP and/or suck up to your rep / friends as many have surely come close to capacity!

All Star Directories, the five year-old online education lead generation firm based in Seattle, was purchased recently by Austin Ventures. It is the firms first such acquisition in the interactive lead generation space and from the sounds of it, not the last.

John Cook of the Seattle Post Intelligencer first covered the story after the press embargo ended.

Of the online lead generation companies, All Star Directories is among the larger, more established; the receive their traffic from search, but unlike other major players, they receive mostly organic search traffic rather than engaging in the more common and more scalable paid search arbitrage. This means that their $15 million in revenues as reported in the Seattle P-I had little traffic acquistion costs but with 65 people has some overhead associated with maintaining their thousands of pages of content. Interestingly, All Star Directories started as a pet project of founder Mike Mathieu, an ex-Microsoft exec who was looking for something to do after leaving the world's largest software company.

All Star Directories is not the only successful lead generation firm in that area. World Class Strategy is another group that has ranked in the top 3 or 4 among fastest private companies according the Puget Sound Business Journal and ahead of All Star Directories.